Roughly 50 years ago, the Russian cosmonaut Yury Gagarin—the first human launched into space—reportedly returned to Earth with a simple, Soviet-style message: "I looked and looked and looked, but I didn't see God."

Gagarin was allegedly a believer, and there's some debate about whether he actually uttered those words. But a Kremlin propaganda poster produced at the time featured an image of the cosmonaut floating in space and the slogan, "There is no God."

A Kremlin propaganda poster produced at the time featured an image of the cosmonaut floating in space and the slogan, “There is no God.”via Vocativ

Today's Russian spacemen are towing a very different line. For instance, late last week, the cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev posted a photograph of himself and two of his countrymen standing in front of half a dozen religious icons that they'd attached to the inside of the multibillion dollar International Space Station. Two of the Russian cosmonauts were also wearing icons that they had pinned to their bodies.

For all the talk about how Soviet-style repression has returned to Russia under President Vladimir Putin, one thing that's decidedly not a throwback is the role of the Russian Orthodox Church. To the dismay of critics, the church's power has grown immensely over the past few years as Putin has reached out to Russia's conservative heartland for support.

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In the Soviet era, publicly saying that you believe in God was a surefire way to ruin your career, or at worst, earn a one-way ticket to the Gulag. But today, priests regularly sprinkle Russian space rockets with holy water ahead of liftoff, while the Orthodox Church has even held a religious service in honor of the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons.

Sergei Remezov/Reuters
Besides the icons, the cosmonauts were also wearing the black and orange ribbons that have become associated with the pro-Russia rebels fighting government forces in eastern Ukraine. (Artyemov did not respond to a request for comment.)

Russia's new "faith race," hasn't gone over well with Putin's political opponents. "This has nothing to do with religious belief," wrote one opposition supporter in an online discussion of the image. "This is about ultra-patriotism and Russian Orthodox Church propaganda."

After news of Artemyev's photograph hit the Russian media, opposition leader Alexei Navalny posted the photo on his popular blog under the title "Forgive Us, Yura," a reference to Gagarin.

Navalny wasn't the only one to imagine what the Soviets would have made of all this cosmic holiness. As Kevin Rothrock, the chief editor of Global Voices, a Russian news site, recently put it: "The Soviet atheists would be turning over in their graves, if they hadn't all cremated themselves."